It really is not.ĪM: I can’t believe my book actually got into your hands. I love your book The Twelve Tribes of Hattie so much that I’m choosing it as my new Book Club selection.ĪM: Really? This is really Oprah Winfrey? No, it’s not. I’m calling you because I have some news and I wanted to be the one to share it with you. Though all of that is behind her now, and her mother is in good health, you can feel a young girl’s sense of isolation inhabiting all of the book’s characters. When Ayana finally left to attend college in New York City, she began to suffer from depression herself. As her mother’s depression deepened, she spiraled downward mother and daughter moved from place to place, rarely staying anywhere for long. From that time on, the two were on their own. When Ayana was 10, a rift developed between her mother and the rest of the extended family. Her grandparents, with whom she lived from time to time as a young girl while her mother struggled with mental illness, were among those who took part in this exodus to what they hoped would be a kind of promised land. But there are echoes of Ayana Mathis’s own life, too. The book is set against the backdrop of the Great Migration, the nearly six decades starting around 1915, with six million Black folk migrating north to escape the terrible hardships of the Jim Crow American South. I wanted to know Hattie, to understand her, and to be introduced to everyone in her life. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playīeginning with Ayana’s description of Hattie’s desperate efforts to save her twin babies, Philadelphia and Jubilee, I was completely with Hattie, in her house in Germantown, Philadelphia. When I finished it, I had to be still for a moment. The book’s ending is the most perfect ever. I went to bed after reading the chapter about Hattie’s eldest surviving son, “Lady Boy Floyd,” and woke up the next morning thinking Floyd was a real person. While the paths their lives take are all very different, they share the scars inflicted by a mother who long ago lost the ability to be tender. Her 11 children and one grandchild are Hattie’s “12 tribes”-whom we meet sequentially in 12 distinct narrative threads. The novel tells the story of Hattie Shepherd, who leaves Georgia for Philadelphia in 1923. This book was so astonishing, it left me speechless. Before I’d even finished the first chapter, I knew I’d found my second Oprah Book Club 2.0 pick. It was an advance copy-the book hadn’t yet been published. Several months ago, I sat down to read The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, the debut novel by 39-year-old Ayana Mathis. In honor of the 10th anniversary of Mathis’s book release, we’re revisiting her interview with Oprah.

This story originally appeared as “The Opening Pages Took My Breath Away” in the January 2013 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

The tribes of hattie